Warrior Chronicles 5: Warrior's Curse (19 page)

All military discipline was gone inside the building. The Marines that weren’t vomiting or crying were viciously mutilating the corpses of lizards. Looking around and seeing he had been right about the building being a slaughterhouse, Cort knew there was nothing he could do to stop the Marines, so he commed George.

“Son, lock down all the CONDORS at my location. Then patch me through to them.”

Every CONDOR in the building, and some of the ones outside, froze in place. Momentum caused a few of them to topple over. “They are immobilized, Father.”

Once the chatter on the comms stopped, Cort said, “This is Ares. I’ve seen inside the building. I know it’s bad. But right now, I need you to all remember your training. You are United…”

Cort caught himself in the comfort of his own training from centuries past, and went on. “You are Ares Federation Marines. You are the most disciplined, effective, and deadly fighting force in two universes. Right now I need you to remember that discipline. I promise you,
we will get ours.
Here and now though, we need to put a stop to this. Let’s save the humans we can, and honor the ones we can’t. Remember. You are Marines.”

George returned control of the CONDORs to their occupants and Cort began walked back into the building. He saw that his HAWC was much too large for the walkways and ceilings, but a FALCON was too small. So he went outside and found the pile of empty CONDORS. Once he found his personal CONDOR, set apart from the others by a quick-thinking Jaifan, he donned it and walked back toward the building. After taking a deep breath to settle his own nerves, Cort stepped inside the nightmare.

Twelve

Cort walked down a ramp that took him to the main level of the facility. He stepped onto a walkway that led between rows of small, automated beds. The occupied bassinets held young babies. He realized the abductions from Earth had been going on for a long time when he noticed distinct ethnicities among the children, including what appeared to him to be other species. He had only seen neanderthals in scientific renderings, but he suspected that was what some of the babies before him were.
Don’t stop and stare, Cort. Stay stoic. I’m all that is keeping these Marines sane right now.

He looked at the rows and rows of infants. Each bed had several overhanging arms that Cort couldn’t identify. There were three tubes in each bed as well. One was clear and filled with what Cort assumed was milk because of its nipple-shaped end. Another was attached to the babies’ arms, and the last terminated in a cup that was obviously for the removal of waste.

“Ares to Fleet. Get medical teams down here now. To every one of these damnable places. Human or Jaifan, we need anyone with medical experience down here now. We need to get these babies out of here.”

“Fleet to Ares. Repeat. Did you say
babies?”

“Affirmative. We have several hundred human babies at this location. I assume the same is true of the other targets. Get shuttles, ships, whatever down here to get people out. Coordinate with the other teams to prioritize transport.

He stepped over a dead lizard and past the nursery area into the next section of the building. There were two squirming babies on a table. One had some sort of laser tattoo on both its forehead and its abdomen, and the other was under the presumed marker, which appeared to be bent. There was a partial tattoo on the second baby’s head.

A Marine nearby said, “Sir, I broke it before it could mark her abdomen. We’ve stopped the conveyors where we knew it was safe to. It’s a lot worse further inside.”

The young man’s voice sounded distant, almost mechanical.
He’s turned off his emotions. Good. There’ll be time for emotions later.

“Do you know what the arms over the beds are for?”

“Sir, I’d guess they are some sort of device for touching or maybe massaging the babies. They were rubbing the babies when we first came inside.”

Kobe beef. Fuck me.
“Okay. I’ve got transport coming down for the ones that are still alive.”

“Sir, there aren’t any live ones beyond here. It’s a meat processing plant.”

“It’s a slaughterhouse. And the fucking lizards are going to pay for having humans in it.”

“Sir, I hope so, General.”

“I
know
so, Marine,” Cort replied as he went through a door to the next area.

The real hell began beyond a wall that Cort supposed was to insulate the babies from the rest of the factory’s sounds. The first section appeared to be a stunning station. There were two prods that Cort guessed were to designed to touch the skull and the chest of each baby as they were processed. Just as with Terran livestock, the right shock
humanely
electrocuted the baby, inducing a grand mal seizure that rendered the still living child senseless. After the electrical shock, the twitching body was hoisted by one leg and sent sliding down a rail.

Cort reached up with one hand and broke the chain fastened to one twitching body. He lifted the naked little boy and carried him back out to the Marine at the marking station. “This one might still be okay. Get him to medical as quick as you can.”

“Yes, sir.”

Back in the processing area, Cort found the next body and broke its chains as well. Had the Marines known about how meat was processed in Cort’s time, they might have known this one had also been savable if they had gotten him down soon enough.
There’s no reason to add that guilt to their anguish.
The he laid the fat little cherub on the work table as gently as possible. There were two babies further down the line there were dead without a doubt. They had been bled while alive, their own hearts pumping the blood out of holes in their necks, even as the hearts themselves slowly faded away.

Cort looked at his HUD to verify it was recording video but not transmitting, and he made his way further down the line. At the next station, Cort first thought there was only one baby. A presumed neanderthal boy was hanging just over a brine of salt water, the rail sloping down into the bath. Cort’s helmet scanned the bath and confirmed his fear. Beneath the surface, there were two more bodies that had been in the bath since Marines first shut the facility down. After pulling the babies out of the scalding salt bath, he took a deep breath, fought his bile in a contest for control of his stomach, and went to the next work area.

Only one baby this time. A plump black girl with almost no hair was about to be carried by the rail system through series of curved paddles Cort recognized from his own time, as a mechanism to scrape hair off of the scalded bodies.
Which means next up is…
Cort took the little girl down and laid her body on the machine that ran the paddles. Then he stepped on the head of the lizard at his feet.
Keep calm, Cort. Don’t become one of the loose cannons.

Cort was thankful that one of his people had cleared the next machine. It was an incinerator that burned any remaining hair off the bodies. On his Earth, it served to sterilize the carcass as well. The next section of conveyor held a plump baby that appeared to be a hybrid of human and neanderthal. It had been gutted, and the entrails lay below the body in a pile of eviscerated organs.

Cort had to stop for a moment. Remembering his own training, he took several deep breaths and shut down his own emotional responses. There would be a price to pay later, as there always was when you stopped their flow, but right now he needed a clear head.

In the next area, he found a baby with its head hanging by just a small section of skin. The neck was cleanly cut and cauterized by what Cort thought was some sort of laser knife. He absentmindedly noted that his HUD showed the temperature had dropped more than thirty degrees Celsius. The baby’s eyes were open, causing Cort to turn away as he disconnected yet another body from the conveyor and tried to arrange the body with some dignity.

The next victim was splayed across a saw that had been stopped halfway down the body. Both of its legs had chains on them, suspended from the same hook. The child next to that one was completely halved with the body’s right half still holding the head.

After that, the bodies were processed even further, to the point that Cort could not offer them any further grace. The frozen cuts of meat were stacked in bins according to body part, and further separated by skin tone. Cort realized he hadn’t seen a single modern human baby with the olive-green skin tone that all post-Cull humans possessed.
So where are the people who have been abducted recently? Have they not had enough time here to give birth? Time,
he thought.
It keeps coming back to time.

Beyond the bins of body parts was another door. Cort opened it, stepped inside, and was immediately hit by three ballistic weapon bursts.

“Ares under fire! Form on me!” he shouted as thoughts of slaughtered babies left his mind, replaced by only those of survival and revenge. He pulled the VERG to his shoulder looked at the command ‘SMOKE’ in his hud and fired into the room. After reactivating his active camouflage he switched to infrared on his helmet and peered into the smoke from a prone position on the floor.

There were several dozen lizards firing from around the room, which was nearly as large as the processing area had been. Most were hiding behind the bins body parts were stored in, and Cort realized he would have to fire through the frozen human flesh to hit his targets. He entered the room and rolled to the right, firing his VERG every time he was prone. Three lizards fell before something struck him from behind. A large, muscular, tail swept his CONDOR further along, using his own momentum against him and sending him into a pile of offal.

Cort stood up quickly, distantly registering the material clinging to his armor and around his feet as he fired at the lizard who had unknowingly swept him aside. The round went through the enemy’s head and seemed to stop in the doorway to the room. Cort heard the screams over his comm and realized the round had hit another CONDOR entering the room.
Fuck!

Two more CONDORs pulled the wounded Marine back through the door and then took high and low positions to fire toward Cort before he could identify himself. The twin blows of subsonic carbon slugs knocked him back ten meters, and he fell into a pit, at the bottom of which was a still-functioning conveyor belt.

“Ares down! I’ve been hit! Check your targets!” he yelled as he tried to stand up again, only to find that the belt had entered a tunnel or pipe and he had no room to move at all.

“This is Ares. Track my signal. I’m on a conveyor belt inside a pipe of some sort. I can’t move. Figure out where I am and come get me.”

“Yes, sir!” someone answered. “We are tracking you now and will retrieve you after we clear this area.”

“Copy that. Ares out.”

Cort followed the action above on his HUD, while his CONDOR self-repaired. He took note of his surroundings and realized he was once again in a pile of human offal. He wondered about how the suit would self-repair.
Will it encase the baby flesh, or somehow purge it? Funny how I’ve never thought about how the self-repair systems work.
He called up the specs on the suit, as much to keep his mind off of his surroundings as to learn about the suit.

He looked at his HUD and, seeing the suit designation, remembered he was in one of the third-generation CONDORs, not an earlier version that simply laminated new layers of graphene onto the old damaged sections. The process started the same, but after a sealing layer was built up over a dent, the dent itself was reabsorbed into the suit’s repair kit.
What about other materials? Like baby flesh. Will I be carrying atoms from human babies for the rest of this suit’s lifespan?

Cort was roused from his thoughts by a voice. “Ares, this is Voss. We have the enemy neutralized and are conducting a sweep of the rest of the building. What is your status?”

“I’m still moving through the pipe. Why wasn’t the building already cleared?”

“We thought it was, sir. In the uh, confusion, some areas were not searched.”

Cort recognized what the confusion had been. “That’s understandable, Voss. Don’t make the mistake again though. What’s the time frame for getting me out of here?”

“Unknown, sir. We show you still in building, but several levels below us. Should we risk a tachyon scan of the area?”

“No. We still don’t know what took our people down, but it was either tachyons or telepathy. Until we know which, I don’t want to risk our people. How’s the man I shot?”
 

“That was me, sir. It hurt like hell, because your round dented my chest plate so deeply, but I’ll be fine.”

“Good to know. Is the building clear now?”

“Unknown. We think this level is, but you’re heading into an area we don’t know about. Stay on your toes, sir. If it hits the fan for you, we’ll come through the pipe. Otherwise, we’ll catch you at the other end.”

“Copy that. Be careful.”

“No, sir. We don’t get paid enough to be careful.”

As the comm with Voss cut, Cort smiled before dropping into a pit filled with both fresh and rotting material. There was a grinding sound somewhere on the other side, probably toward the floor. The pit was round, nearly two meters in diameter, and about four meters deep. It was partially filled with human remains, and when Cort got to his feet he found the offal rose to just above the CONDOR’s waist.

The walls of the pit were some kind of metal and smooth all the way around, so Cort punched holes in its sides with his fingers, creating hand and foot holds that allowed him to climb out of the tank. As his helmet crested the rim, he realized he was in a tank, not a pit, and there was a single unarmed lizard staring at him from a control panel. 

Cort pulled himself over the rim of the tank and dropped to the floor, causing a length of intestine to shake loose from his boot and splatter on the floor. He looked down at the mess, then raised his sidearm to fire at the lizard. As the gun lined up with the alien’s skull, Cort felt the beginning of headache, something he hadn’t felt since he first took a dose of synthetics.